Sophie Walker, the leader of the Women’s Equality party.
Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Sophie Walker believes that British businesses are sitting on a lucrative untapped resource that could help to stop a decline in global financial markets and a slowdown in the world economy. That resource is women.

“We are in the crazy situation where economists are issuing really gloomy forecasts about growth, and on the other we have McKinsey [the consultancy] saying if we close the gender pay gap, we can add something like $28tn to the global economy,” she explains. “There is a huge opportunity there that is not being taken.”

Walker is at the forefront of trying to unlock this resource as the leader of the new Women’s Equality party, and as its candidate for the London mayoral election in May.

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“I think we have tapped into a really deep sense of frustration,” she says. “Yes, it has grown very fast but actually I am not that surprised because, at the last election, very many people in this country felt they were not being heard, seen and listened to. It was a conversation among people who had already decided what the parameters of that conversation were.

“When you look at where we are in terms of existing deep structural problems of inequality between women and men, it seems staggering to me for that we are still just talking about how to make the Equal Pay Act work when it is 45 years old, and that we are still talking about how we parent equally. Lots and lots of young men are joining our party because they are deeply frustrated by the very traditional and unimaginative options that are being presented to them.”

Walker describes her party’s policy document as an “economic document” which is anchored in equal pay, equal opportunities and equal rights.

“At the moment I am talking to lots of business people as part of our manifesto for London,” she explains. “London is like a concentration of where everything has gone wrong. We see it as a place that is a brilliant place to live, but actually if you are woman living in London you are more likely to be unemployed and you are more likely to be living in poverty. Last year alone London’s women earned £50bn less than London’s men. The pay gap is bigger – the national average pay gap is about 15%, in London it’s 23%.

“So I have been talking to lots of businesses in London about how we tackle this. What is really encouraging to me is actually I think the stars have aligned. Everybody is now in the same place where they understand that diversity in business is a really crucial profit driver. It is not a women’s issue any more, it’s a business issue.”

The party’s proposals include introducing quotas so that 50% of a company’s board and 50% of its executive committee are made up of women within the next 10 years.

Boardroom gender quotas are a controversial topic among men and women, but Walker reckons the time has come for them to be introduced. The government-backed Davies review set a target of 25% of FTSE 100 directors being female by 2015, which was met, and at least a third by 2020. However, Walker believes that companies can go much further.

“I think it is disappointing that we are still only looking at representing 51% of the population with 30% targets,” she says.

“We have said from the get-go that we would want to see quotas. That was the result of talking to our members. The answer came back loud and clear from the membership – it’s time for quotas because the way we are approaching it now isn’t working.”

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Other policies include an overhaul of maternity and paternity policies so that there is shared parental leave of six weeks at 90% for both partners, and free childcare from nine months.

“We are in a situation where I think less than 10% of men in the UK take the two weeks paternity leave that you are offered,” Walker says. “There is a huge amount of work to do because many men actually want to take it and feel very frustrated that they can’t, because they are the chief breadwinner or the workplace culture says that they can’t.

“That is a really key part of our policy plank – to say that we can parent equally and we are free to make real choices about how we balance work, life and family.”

Walker also wants to encourage more girls and young women to take up careers linked to the Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects and, crucially, wants companies to be more transparent about the pay and opportunities that women are offered.

“There are two things here – there is equal pay and then the gender gap,” she says. “They are often jumbled up as one big very difficult problem that we can’t fix because its ‘Oh, it’s really hard’. But on equal pay I think it’s very simple. We should have full transparency of what is going on within Britain’s companies.

“There is an annual report that already goes out, lets add an extra page on what is going on inside – a full breakdown of pay – what men are earning, what women are earning, what levels they are at within the company, whether they are working full-time or part-time, what the stickiness levels are before and after parental leave, break it all down by ethnicity and disability. Then you get a proper look.”

Walker says it is disappointing that the government has not done more to promote transparency, particularly because the companies she is speaking to are increasingly willing to cooperate.

“I am not going to sit here and give you a list of all the really bad ones,” she explains. “We have spoken to lots of different companies. I think there is a huge amount of work we can do in tech. I think actually what is going to happen is that tech will lead the way because tech is a very young, diverse industry which is just not prepared to put up with old-fashioned ways of doing things any more.”

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It is vital that London changes from an economic perspective, Walker adds, because otherwise it will become less attractive as a place to work.

“If London wants to continue to attract the best talent it has to present itself as an imaginative and creative place to work and not a place with companies that have got 10 men on the board who all work very set hours. I think increasingly we are seeing women break out of unfulfilling, unimaginative workplaces. We have seen various stages of brain-drain from British industry when the conditions weren’t right and unless Britain’s businesses really get on top of this, the same thing is going to happen again.”

At the moment, “there is a bit of fiddling at this and a bit of fiddling at that. But actually it’s not complicated. It’s complex, but not complicated.”